Effective communication of all sorts, including informal (e.g., interpersonal) and formal (e.g., official business), is needed every day. Effective communication has the following characteristics: mutual understanding of content by all interlocutors, which may be evidenced by feedback; people getting what they need to know when they need to know it; and written records that are easily accessible by subject and chronology. Effective communication is often difficult.
There are a number of barriers to effective communication, such as:
Difference in technical or academic discipline
Prejudices and attitudes
Personality differences
Hidden Agendas
Emotions
Fear of blame or retribution
Culture differences
No communication plan
Imprecise language
People use language differently
Another aspect of communication is that people are now communicating more with people they do not know well or have not met in person. When people interact and talk together for a long time (especially in person), they understand better how each other uses language.
In a simple example, a first person might say “the software is buggy”, and the first person may mean that one bug was found. A second person might say “the software is buggy”, and the second person may mean that the software crashes, produces logical errors, and needs to be retested and rewritten. If the people have worked together on software for a long time and one person says “the software is buggy”, the other person may know what the person means.
Because each person is an individual with a unique conditioning, personality, etc., it is possible for there to occur miscommunications or misinterpretations, particularly when dealing with complex and/or controversial topics across multiple people with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
People see the world and use language differently. What person A says and what person B hears may be two different things. This is based on the fact that their minds work differently, they have different education, they have different cultural exposure, and they speak and live with different people.
Communication, which is useful to resolving most conflicts, may be the cause of conflict. For instance, a sender may not be clear in his or her communication or a recipient may not be truly listening. Making assumptions can also affect communication. A lack of communication can result in misunderstanding.
With communication, both the sender and recipient of a message should understand the message in the way the sender means for the message to be understood. When there is effective communication, the recipient reads and then expresses an understanding of the message in his/her own words back to the sender. The sender determines whether the message was understood as intended and, if not, sends further communications until satisfied. While this can be time consuming and sometimes frustrating, it is useful to proceed with work at hand. Without a mutual understanding, people may take action with the wrong idea of what to do and how to do it. Inevitably, that leads to rework. It can also lead to interpersonal conflict, which can be far more costly and disruptive than rework.